Do you like playing Jenga? I don’t. It’s nerve-wracking when one wrong move can bring down the entire structure, leaving you standing there looking silly and counting the blocks.

Now imagine: you’re building not just a tower of blocks, but an entire city. People live in it, they have names, needs, and a desire not to drown. And every decision you make is a potential earthquake. That’s roughly how All Will Fall was marketed.

And, admittedly, the developers at All Parts Connected, together with publisher tinyBuild, did everything they could to make us believe we were in for a suicide architect simulator where mistakes are unavoidable. But in reality, it turned out… well, it turned out. Not bad, but with a hint of “could have been brilliant.”

Forget about green lawns and cozy valleys, All Will Fall drops you onto the surface of a dead planet, where dry land is a luxury available only to those who have the foresight to cling to the remnants of a former civilization. Oil platforms, rusting tankers, and the ruins of skyscrapers—this is your starting capital.

You are the leader of a small group of survivors who look out over the endless ocean and understand: there is no turning back. Only up.

And it’s damn refreshing. Instead of endlessly crawling across the plain, you’re forced to climb into the sky, like a spider weaving its web between ruins. Every new floor is a risk. Every bridge to the next tower is a leap of faith. The game oppresses with claustrophobia and simultaneously evokes the feeling of creating something ephemeral, suspended over the abyss.

This visual and emotional contrast is the project’s first and perhaps greatest success. But a beautiful idea is only half the story. The other half is how it works in practice.

All Will Fall’s main selling point is its physics-based building simulation. Every block, every beam, every choice has weight. The load is distributed across the supports, and if you build a high-rise on top of a house of cards, it will collapse. It sounds like a maniacal engineer’s dream. In practice, this mechanic feels more like a hint system than the harsh law of gravity.

Yes, structures creak and warp when you overload them. Yes, bridges without intermediate supports sag and eventually break. But this doesn’t happen as often as you’d think. The game is reluctant to punish you for every mistake, as if afraid to scare off newcomers. Instead of the cathartic “I ruined everything because I was a hasty idiot,” you get a weak warning: “Hey, something bad could have happened here, but we’ll give you a chance to improve it.”

And that’s probably the most frustrating part. When a game is called All Will Fall, you expect your creations to collapse with an epic crash, forcing you to rethink every step. What you get is more like an architectural simulator with elements of Tetris.

I’ve seen similar mechanics before—in Besiege, for example, or Poly Bridge. But there, they took it to the extreme: build crookedly, and you’re plummeting into the abyss. Here, the developers clearly overdid the handholding.

On the other hand, this approach makes the game more accessible. You can experiment without fear of losing hours of progress. But the main point is lost—the sense of fragility, which should be at the center of the gaming experience. There is fragility, but it’s mostly decorative.

But the mechanic that works flawlessly is the water level. The ocean in All Will Fall isn’t just a backdrop. It breathes, advancing and retreating, changing the rules of the game every day. At low tide, new areas open up, allowing you to access resources that were previously hidden underwater. At high tide, you have to evacuate the lower floors, otherwise your workers will go feed the fish.

This forces you to constantly monitor the horizon, build with extra height, and plan ship routes so they can return before the docks are submerged. Then there are storms and tornadoes that destroy everything poorly secured. These are the moments when you sit and watch in horror as your perfectly designed neighborhood turns to rubble in a matter of minutes.

This is where the game truly resembles Frostpunk—not in appearance, but in spirit. The same constant pressure, the same crisis situations where you’re on edge, and any wrong decision leads to death. But instead of cold, there’s water; instead of coal, there’s wood and metal. If the developers had transferred this level of tension to the construction physics, we’d have a masterpiece.

For now, we have to make do with what we have.

But enough about the elements. All Will Fall is also a colony management game. You have three groups of settlers: workers (who haul logs), sailors (who sail the ocean), and engineers (who repair generators and invent new technologies). Each faction has its own interests, and you’ll have to juggle their demands like a circus performer with flaming torches.

Decided to build a new workshop for the engineers? The workers are offended—they need new barracks. Upgraded the sailors’ ships? The engineers grumble about not having enough resources for research. Elections, compromises, and sometimes outright repression—all of this affects morale, and morale, in turn, affects productivity.

Interestingly, the game allows you to be both a good shepherd and a tyrant. In one scenario, you can hand out treats and build bars to boost morale, while in another, you can tighten the screws and send the disgruntled to the most dangerous areas. And this isn’t just a gameplay gimmick, but a true moral test. Especially when you look at the faces of your colonists (even if they’re sketchy) and realize that your decision just sent someone to their death.

Speaking of faces, the game’s visuals aren’t particularly impressive. Everything is gray, gloomy, covered in water and rust. While it suits the setting, after a few hours, you start to yearn for bright colors. The sound doesn’t help either: the splashing of water and the hammering of hammers are the same 80% of the time. The music appears rarely and is remarkable in how unmemorable it is.

If you get tired of the standard sandbox (and you will rather quickly), scenarios come to the rescue. Eight starting conditions, each with its own unique twist. For example, you start on a huge tanker that’s slowly falling apart—you need to relocate everyone before it sinks. Or on the “Cyber ​​Tower”—a tiny platform where every square centimeter counts, and every expansion is a puzzle.

These scenarios truly change the way you experience the game. They force you to use different tactics and find unconventional solutions. And thanks to Steam Workshop support and a built-in editor, fans have already started churning out their own versions. So the game has a high replayability—the only question is whether you have the patience to endure the technical issues to get to this diversity.

And now for what ruins the experience the most. Optimization in All Will Fall is a pain. On average computers, the game lags even at minimum settings, and on high-end ones, it experiences strange FPS drops. The developers promise patches, but the release version is, unfortunately, still a bit rough around the edges.

The AI ​​of your subordinates isn’t exactly brilliant either. Workers might ignore the nearest forest and trudge halfway across the map just because they felt like it. Ships you ordered to collect metal suddenly switch to wood. Setting priorities helps, but not always.

The camera is a different story. It’s capricious when you try to see the upper tiers, preventing you from zooming in properly. Combined with the vertical construction, it turns into a quest to “find the right balcony.”

And all this isn’t counting minor bugs, like frozen animations and random crashes. Some reviewers rightly note that the game feels like an Early Access product. For $29.99, that’s a bit of a shame.

Is All Will Fall worth playing right now?

Players praise the concept and setting, but criticize the realization. If you’re a fan of city builders and are willing to put up with bugs for the sake of an original idea, go for it. Especially if you have a powerful PC that can handle all this unoptimized beauty.

If you’re expecting a polished product where the physics work flawlessly and the AI ​​doesn’t lag, wait a couple of months for the developers to release patches. Or, at least, wait for a discount.

My personal opinion: All Will Fall is a game you want to believe in.

I spent about twenty hours with All Will Fall. And in that time, I managed to both love and hate it. When you stand at the top of your tower, looking out over the endless ocean, realizing that this is your city, your fortress above the abyss—it’s pure joy. But when the game crashes for the third time that evening or the workers get stuck in the textures, you want to slam something heavy on the monitor.

It has a soul. It has ambition. But discipline is lacking. It’s like a talented student who wrote a brilliant essay but forgot to check the spelling. Yet, technical errors can be corrected. And if the developers get their act together, All Will Fall could become the city-building game we’ll remember for years to come. For now, it’s just a very good, albeit crude, game.